• for: elephants in the room - financial industry at the heart of the polycrisis, polycrisis - key role of finance industry, Marjorie Kelly, Capitalism crisis, Laura Flanders show, book - Wealth Supremacy - how the Extractive Economy and the Biased Rules of Captialism Drive Today's Crises

• Summary

  • This talk really emphasizes the need for the Stop Reset Go / Deep Humanity Wealth to Wellth program
  • Interviewee Marjorie Kelly started Business Ethics magainze in 1987 to show the positive side of business After 30 years, she found that it was still tinkering at the edges. Why? - because it wasn't addressing the fundamental issue.
  • Why there hasn't been noticeable change in spite of all these progressive efforts is because we avoided questioning the fundamental assumption that maximizing returns to shareholders and gains to shareholder portfolios is good for people and planet.**** It turns out that it isn't. It's fundamentally bad for civilization and has played a major role in shaping today's polycrisis.
  • Why wealth supremacy is entangled with white supremacy
  • Financial assets are the subject
    • Equity and bonds use to be equal to GDP in the 1950s.
    • Now it's 5 times as much
  • Financial assets extracts too much from common people
  • Question: Families are swimming in debt. Who owns all this financial debt? ...The financial elites do.

• meme

  • wealth supremacy and white supremacy are entangled

• for: climate crisis - elites, Kevin Anderson - elites, carbon emissions - elites, adjacency - elites - carbon inequality - incentives - luxury - capitalism

• title: A Habitable Earth Can No Longer Afford The Rich – And That Could Mean Me And You

• author: Kevin Anderson

• date: Nov. 29, 2023

• comment

• adjacency between
  • elites
  • capitalism
  • free market
  • incentives
  • double bind
  • wicked problem
  • inequality
  • carbon inequality
  • luxury industry
• adjacency statement
  • This article was pulled by "The Conversation" for being too controversial
  • It addresses the double-bind / wicked problems that we find ourselves in.
  • It's not just that the elites that are the highest per capita polluters, but
    • it is an indictment of the entire philosophy and worldview of capitalism and the market economy which produces winners and losers and
    • the winners reap enormous resource benefits, including being able to afford luxury items as rewards which constitute the largest ecological footprint of all
  • while at any one time, there is always a minority of the 1%, who hold the most outsized ecological footprint of all, the logic that produced that 1% also serves as the incentives for the majority of the 99%, who because of the inherent precarity created by capitalism, will fight and struggle to become part of that 1%
  • So while one generation of the 1% die off, a new generation is born and created by the incentive structure of scarcity and precarity.
  • In this sense, capitalism has its own self-reinforcing, positive feedback loop that keeps the masses of the disenfranchised aspiring to the same high resource and ecological footprint, luxury lifestyle
  • Look at the culture industry of sports, entertainment, movies, music, TV, etc. and of business in general. The leaders of these and ALL fields are celebrated as heros and they all reward themselves with an ultra-high carbon intensity, luxury lifestyle.
  • Unless we do more than simply demonize the current set of elites, and recognize the root cause and change the incentive structure itself, we will only ever deal with the symptom and not the problem, and continue to generate the next generation of elites
  • The luxury lifestyle industry is a important role-player in the self-reinforcing feedback loop

!- Urrego : second point - can the same capitalist logic be used to solve the crisis it created?

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/14/climate/patagonia-climate-philanthropy-chouinard.html

The problem with capitalism is that in times of fecundity things can seem to magically work so incredibly well because so much of the system is hidden, yet when problems arise so much becomes much more obvious.

Unseen during fecundity is the amount of waste and damage done to our environments and places we live. Unseen are the interconnections and the reliances we make on our environment and each other.

There is certainly a longer essay hiding in this idea.

Horton, Richard. ‘Offline: COVID-19—a Crisis of Power’. The Lancet 396, no. 10260 (31 October 2020): 1383. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)32262-5.

This is an interesting and telling example.

Here's a place were those who cry capitalism will save us should be shouting the loudest!

Gray, J. (2020 April 01). Why this crisis is a turning point in history. https://www.newstatesman.com/international/2020/04/why-crisis-turning-point-history